Analyzing the Risks of the Sustainable Supply Chain of Refineries Based on Bipolar Neutrosophic Numbers

This study aims to reduce and manage the risks in a sustainable supply chain of refineries and to adopt appropriate strategies to deal with the sanctions.

The present study is typically practical in terms of purpose and quantitative in terms of approach, consisting of interviews and questionnaires, and exploratory in nature. The statistical population studied included all top managers of the engineering, safety, health, environment and passive defence, research and technology, and operations and exploitation departments of Abadan Oil Refining Company. By using numerous questionnaires and taking advantage of the opinions of experts and experts in the oil refining industry, in this study, five main categories of sustainable supply chain risks and their 13 sub-factors were identified. After extracting sustainable supply chain risks from the literature using the fuzzy Delphi technique, the list of these risks was refined according to the economic conditions of Iran based on the opinions of experts. Then, the risk items and subsets identified in the previous step were weighted and prioritized using the SWARA technique.

It was found that using bipolar neutrosophic number sets is more effective than other methods when dealing with complex, ambiguous, and inadequate information. This technique can process positive and negative information simultaneously. The results indicated that the best strategies to deal with sanctions are reconstruction and major repairs in production lines, “focusing on research and development of products and processes”, and “reducing insurance premiums for domestic producers”. Also, the findings of SWARA's technique denoted that among the main risks, "lack of infrastructure" is the top priority and the "critical" risk is the last priority.

One limitation that should be considered is that the findings of this study were conducted in Abadan Oil Refining Company. Therefore, examining this approach in other companies might lead to different results. Given that this study was conducted at a specific period, caution should be exercised in generalizing the results in the long term and in the future. In this research, the Fuzzy Delphi, SWARA, Bipolar Neutrosophic and TOPSIS techniques were applied. Therefore, if a study is conducted using other approaches or other risks and strategies, the results might be different.

While explaining the neutrosophic method of bipolarity, the results can be used by managers in making policies in various economic fields, especially the oil refining industry. As a future research subject, the risks and strategies proposed in this study can be used to assess sustainable supply chain risks in other units in different industries to determine the model's validity. Based on the research findings, this study suggested focusing on the first three strategies that had higher priorities: i) renovation and major repairs in production lines; ii) establishing companies that can verify product quality and issue approvals at the international level, and iii) reducing insurance premiums for domestic producers. The proposed strategies are practically valuable for policymakers and managers who intend to enhance their ability against sanctions.

Sanctions have had a negative impact on the business revenues. Therefore, adopting the right strategies to counter and neutralize sanctions will improve corporate revenues. Increasing corporate revenues will enable them to fulfil their social responsibilities better and improve public satisfaction and societal well-being.

Most previous studies have examined barriers or presented models, while the innovation of this research can be explained in terms of identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing sustainable supply chain risks using bipolar neutrosophic hierarchical analysis in the Abadan oil refinery, a subject which had been neglected by researchers. The most important advantages of the present study include the combined and scaled reasoning method, rapid calculation, application of different weights of risks and strategies, inclusion of qualitative and quantitative indicators, high accuracy, and ranking and prioritization of risks and strategies.